For a hundred years the Greek emperors kept a precarious hold on what is now Tunisia; then the flood of Arab conquest broke upon the shores of North Africa, Roman civilization was swept away along with Christianity, the priests were murdered on their own altars, the crescent replaced the cross above such towns as were permitted to remain standing, and Carthage was stormed by Hassan, who laid the afflicted city in ruins for a second time, everything that was left above ground being carried away to be used in the reconstruction and adornment of Tunis, Kairouan, and other Arab cities. Thenceforward Carthage was to be but a quarry for Arab and European builders, the Genoese sailors boasting that they never returned from an African voyage without a ballast of Carthaginian marbles, great quantities of which, it is said, were utilized in the construction of the cathedral of Pisa. Only once more does Carthage make its bow to history, when Louis IX of France, leading the Last Crusade, died from the plague while encamped upon its site. For upward of twelve hundred years Tunisia suffered under Arab barbarity and misrule, and the shores of the Western Mediterranean from Arab depredations. Then the troop-laden transports of a regenerated France dropped anchor off La Goulette, and the harassed, war-torn country entered on a new era of civilization and prosperity under the tricolor. All this is history, of course, and to my readers doubtless already familiar, but I offer no apologies for repeating it here, because, without the background of the Punic Wars, of the Roman, Vandal, and Byzantine occupations, and the Moslem conquest, it is impossible to realize the tremendous significance of that sun-drenched hill-slope, littered with heaps of débris and dotted with excavation mounds, strewn with the rubble of crumbling walls and shattered marbles, where the Mistress of the Mediterranean once sat enthroned in her pomp of pride and power. CHAPTER VI ASHES OF EMPIRE